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The Spark of Inspiration

Written by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

Neil O'Connor looked over at Johan. "Say what ever you like, man, that girl is fine." He continued to turn the spark plug wrench as he talked.

"She may be pretty but she is too forward, I think," Albrecht Knopf said. "She is becoming too American in her attitudes."

Neil pulled the plug and glanced at it. Whatever he was planning to say about the girl was forgotten. "Damn! This thing is burned clear through. You guys have been running the mix too lean again, haven't you?"

Neil and Al were doing thousand hour maintenance on the Jupiter, which was known far and wide as the Monster. Neil didn't know why Georg Markgraf didn't just give up and change the name, but he wasn't the designer, so what the heck.

Al poked his head around the cowling. "How's our stock?"

"All down-time made," Neil said. "Change them every hundred flight hours. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that we can make them at all."

"Too complicated?" Al Knopf asked with a bit of a glint in his eye.

"No. Incompatible expansion rates." Neil held up his hand in surrender, or at least partial surrender. "More a chemistry problem than craftsmanship." He had lost a number of bets with Al over the last few months. They'd been bets having to do with what down-time craftsmen could do with just a file and a chunk of metal.

Neil looked back at the plug and then at Johan. "You know, I wonder how long it's going to be till we start building aircraft engines."

"Start?" Al asked. "We have already started! How much of that engine we're working on was made here? The plugs, the gaskets, three tappet valves. . . ."

Neil held up his hands, interrupting the list before Al got good and started. Al could talk for hours about the parts of the engines that were now handmade. "That's not what I meant, Al. How long till we start from the design and make engines that are really for airplanes, not just auto engines pushed into service?"

"I don't know, Neil," Johan said. "But if we don't do it soon, we'll be buying our engines from someone who has." He shrugged and grinned. "Anyway, that's a management problem. I'm just a pilot. I just point the plane where they tell me to go." Johan made a great deal of money pointing the plane where he was told. Not to mention the stock options. Still, in spite of being unwilling to bet with Al on what down-time craftsmen could do, Neil didn't believe it. A whole engine was just too complicated for the down-time tech base to handle.

****

Magdalena van de Passe set down the phone with a sigh. If it wasn't the fuel, it was the engines. She had just had to turn down another job. Because they had just one airplane. Well, three, if you stretched it to include two two-seat small planes that ran with a pilot and a sack of mail. And they couldn't keep the Monster in the air all the time. She had had it all explained to her in great boring detail. In normal use, an automobile engine might reasonably be expected to do thirty thousand miles a year. Perhaps fifty thousand, on rare occasion even one hundred thousand miles a year. But the stress on that engine during most of the time was not that great. The engine would spend time idling, and providing only enough push to maintain the automobile's speed. Not so in an aircraft. For all practical purposes, an airplane spent almost all of its time going uphill, even in level flight. The engines were forced to work as hard as a normal engine going up a grade.

TransEuropean Airlines was making money hand over fist. That was true enough. But they were turning down more jobs than they were taking because if one of their engines broke in a way they couldn't fix, they were out of business.

"Georg, we need more engines. We need more engines because we need more airplanes. And we need them soon."

"And I have the airplanes for you. Two more Jupiter One air frames sitting in the hanger, ready to go, if I could buy the engines for them. Find me eight one-hundred-plus horsepower engines and I'll have two new Jupiters for you in a month," Georg said.

He stopped talking when Neil burst through the door.Neil always burst through doors, generally without knocking first. Neil had apparently heard him, because he said, "Al and Johan figure you should build your own." He shook his head.

"I've been thinking the same thing."

"Maggy, you don't know how complex internal combustion engines are," Neil insisted.

Magdalena and Georg shared a look. It figured that it would be the up-timer in the room that brought that up. Sometimes the up-timer's constant harping on the great and amazing complexity of up-time technology got more than a little old. In point of fact, Magdalena did the in-flight repairs of the Monster's engines. And she probably knew—well, almost—as much about them as Neil did. But Neil failed to grasp the degree of precision that fine craftsman ...